Surrey turns to biogas to reduce waste, fuel its vehicles

Derrick Penner, Vancouver Sun04.01.2015

Progressive Waste Systems’ natural gas-powered trash trucks will become part of Surrey’s plan to divert its organic waste from the garbage stream and use it to produce methane, which will help fuel the trucks.

The City of Surrey has kicked off its experiment in turning organic waste into biogas fuel for its fleet of collection trucks, municipal vehicles and city operations with the hope it might serve as a blueprint for reducing the garbage.

Municipal officials recently broke ground on construction of a multi-million-dollar plant that will take the city’s organic waste — kitchen scraps, yard trimmings — and turn it into what’s referred to as grid-quality methane. Starting in 2017, that methane will be consumed within a cycle that includes fuelling the very trucks that collect the waste, as well as Surrey maintenance trucks and other city operations.

Whether it could work as a commercial venture is another question, since biogas remains considerably more expensive than commodity heating gas. With this closed loop, though — where the biogas is used in vehicles — Surrey’s business case is that it’s no more expensive than its existing trash collection system, said Rob Costanzo, Surrey’s engineering operations manager.

“You get the biggest bang for your buck when you use renewable (biogas) fuel in vehicles,” he said.

And it represents a more aggressive push into the use of biofuels in transportation in B.C., where the provincial government was an early promoter of lower-carbon fuels by setting standards for the inclusion of ethanol (five per cent) and biodiesel (four per cent) content in traditional fossil fuels.

The provincial Ministry of Energy and Mines reports little in the way of biodiesel production has been developed in B.C., with just one major plant capable of producing 11 million litres of biodiesel per year, and no ethanol. Ministry spokesman David Haslam said the production of biofuel isn’t regulated and the province doesn’t track production statistics.

Dan Treleavan, operator of that plant, Consolidated Biofuels in Burnaby, said U.S. jurisdictions offer better incentives for biofuel producers, so that’s where the biodiesel and ethanol for blending fuels tend to come from.

Treleavan started Consolidated’s plant in 2010, making biodiesel out of used cooking oil, mostly focused on the U.S. market, though the company sells some of its output in B.C.

The decline of the world’s oil markets, however, has made biodiesel a tougher business to be in, because while world oil prices have declined, the costs of biofuel producers have not.

In B.C., there is more room for biogas as a transportation fuel, but to start with Fortis BC, the province’s key gas utility, is promoting the shift to cheaper natural gas.

The utility is also working on securing more sources of biogas — from landfills and farming operations — to help fuel its more green-minded customers.

“Transportation would make it more economical, because you’re looking at gasoline or diesel as pricing options,” said Doug Stout, Fortis vice-president for market development and external relations. “And you avoid the carbon tax as well, because it’s renewable natural gas.”

The use of natural gas in commercial transportation remains in its infancy, with only about 500 vehicles running on either compressed or liquefied natural gas, Stout added, but its uses in transportation continue to expand with both BC Ferries and Seaspan commissioning vessels capable of running on natural gas.

Stout said Surrey’s waste-hauling contractor, Progressive Waste Solutions, is an aggressive adopter of natural gas for use in its trucks. In March, Progressive also opened its own $44-million biogas plant in Terrebonne, Que., which collects methane from a landfill near Montreal.

ICostanzo said the initial cost estimate of Surrey’s biogas plant, which is being built as a public-private-partnership by the Canadian subsidiary of a Dutch company, Orgaworld, was $68 million when it was first approved in 2012, but its last estimate shows it can be built for less than that.

Located on 192nd Street in Port Kells, the plant will have the capacity to turn 115,000 tonnes of kitchen and yard waste into 120,000 gigajoules of methane per year. Costanzo said Surrey’s own curbside pickup will contribute about 62,000 tonnes of that input, with the balance to come from commercial collection from within the region.

The way distribution works is that the Surrey biogas plant will pipe its gas into Fortis’s transmission system, which helps displace the need for fossil-fuel generated natural gas from B.C.’s northeast.

Surrey then gets credits for that gas, which allows it to draw equivalent amounts from the Fortis system where it is more convenient for the city, such as at Progressive’s refuelling yard in Coquitlam or the city’s own facilities.

At the start, Progressive’s fleet and Surrey’s civic vehicles will consume about 85,000 gigajoules per year of gas from Fortis, with the balance of the plant’s production available for other city facilities.

In addition to producing biogas, Costanzo said the diversion of organic waste to the facility helps Surrey meet its goal under Metro Vancouver’s integrated waste-management plan to reduce its trash by 70 per cent. The plant’s carbon-dioxide offset is also equivalent to 40,000 tonnes of greenhouse-gas-emissions per year.

“We really are focused on changing our culture to be looking at our garbage as a valuable resource, and no longer as simply landfill material.”

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Surrey turns to biogas to reduce waste, fuel its vehicles

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